Autophagy

A Triptych

Rattlesnakes full of light and ground

squirrel grow back 

their heartmeat, their stores 

of muscle and fat. I am merely

passing shade. All winter 

life fed on itself, each cell

in the earth’s stillness flagging

last year’s proteins

like a logger tagging trunks with paint. 

And so the body recycles

itself. A mechanism

against the disease of age—starvation

for the cure, LA’s

*

dream of lasting youth. 
Adults powerwalk the canyon.

Their children armed with sticks
uncouple the ouroboros

into two rattlers. Each step up
the fire road makes me pure

metabolism, makes me lighter
on the earth. I rest beneath a live oak.

Perhaps its shadow swallows mine.
Perhaps they meet and blur

like lovers out of film’s golden age.
When my grandfather died

that first time he faded 
in on a technicolor meadow.

Flesh, he said, is not the actor
but the screen. It’s a god-

eat-god world and the best lose

*

all appetite. I watch you
measure each meal
by the size of a fist (your doctor’s

orders). On the wall
we’ve hung two carpenters—
Karen and Christ,

patron saints of the anonymous
purgers and restrictors
who ask to be filled

by a higher power.
About half will
relapse. Each month

you get a new chip to remind you
recovery’s still a coin toss.
Our quinoa boils.

Rings of germ appear,
these little halos of sun and starch
that sustain us

we call tails.